1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Circuits, specifically Integrated Circuits (ICs) and, more particularly, to systems and methods for improving the dynamic performance in an Integrated circuit such as an Analog to Digital Converter.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) are well-known circuitries and widely used in many electronic devices. They convert an analog input signal into a digital output signal as a number of bits. Such conversions are typically not 100% accurate and such inaccuracy gives rise to various artifacts including quantization noise and harmonic distortion. These artifacts may be problematic in that the purity of the digital output signal is often of great significance for those applications where an A/D conversion is required. As such, one objective of the invention is to remove these artifacts.
Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) is a common issue faced in many of the high speed ADCs in use today. The total harmonic distortion (THD) of a signal is defined as the ratio of the sum of the powers of all harmonic frequencies above the fundamental frequency to the power of the fundamental frequency. It has been shown that errors in an ADC, such as THD and Spurious Free Dynamic Range (SFDR) tend to occur at the same or multiples of the analog input signal frequency. In other words, these errors occur repeatedly at all of the harmonic frequencies above the fundamental frequency of the input signal. This is significant due to the fact that in many systems, random noise may be tolerable but the noise which is attributable to the harmonic frequencies of the input may not be tolerable.
Hence, there is a need for a system and method to improve the dynamic performance in an analog to digital converter by removing the harmonic noise.